These are two short essays, presented together for reasons that will be
clear when you finish reading them.

I wrote the following disquisition on DYSLEXIA as
a contribution to a discussion group; it seems to have survived some
criticism by people I respect. It's not really a stand-alone essay but it's
close enough. The original topic was why dyslexia was not bred out of the
human race (Greg Cochran is part of the discussion group). There had been
some speculation on what advantage if any dyslexia might confer in a
non-reading society.

DYSLEXIA

The first thing is to agree on what "dyslexia"
"is". In our reading
consulting work "dyslexic" means a child that the local
public school could not teach to read. The local school is likely to be
using some "modern" system of "whole language"
instruction that does not involve systematic phonics and considers
systematic instruction to be "drill and kill".

(It would be amusing to see how well inability to do math correlates
with the diagnosis of dyslexia; many schools no longer require the
addition and multiplication tables to be memorized by rote, greatly
slowing the arithmetical progress of the students; such schools tend also
to non-systematic "reading" instruction, treating English as an
ideographic language. That produces a lot more 'dyslexics' than do schools
that use 'drill and kill' systematic phonics and 'sound it out'
instruction.)

The people I have known who are truly dyslexic - who really and truly
have problems seeing the difference between dog and god, bod and dob, and
other conventional reversal letters - have tended to have other
neurological problems, and I cannot think any of that is an advantage. In
at least two cases the aetiology is birth trauma; I don't say there might
not also have been an hereditary element, but the simple explanation is
that they were damaged by forceps delivery.

True dyslexia is quite rare. There are pseudo dyslexias, that are
fairly easily overcome by training pupils to use alternate sensory
modalities, such as 'writing it in the air', and even saying the word one
letter at a time before trying to decode it. And of course there were
dozens of cases of dyslexia cured in my wife's school by giving the kids
spectacles: they were so astigmatic that it was no wonder they couldn't
read. They couldn't see the letters.

The usual 'dyslexic' is a kid the teacher gave up on, and may or may
not have any systematic neurological problems. So before you erect a
theory of the natural advantages to dyslexia, think on a definition of
what dyslexia 'is' and how you diagnose it. For more on reading, see my wife's
web site.

Lionel Tiger then asked if I
"would turn my laser" on ADD, and this was the result:

Well, I have less expertise on ADD than "dyslexia" simply
because it hardly existed when we were active in correcting "learning
problems" (which now seem to be "learning disorders"). So
far as I can tell, a great number of the cases of ADD translate into
"In school while being a normal boy", i.e., "we're having
trouble teaching this kid self-control, we're not allowed to whack him a
few as they did to you when you were an unruly kid in Capleville, so we
are going to drug hell out of him."

Having raised four boys to manhood without losing any to the
police, drugs, or madness, and without having drugged any of them, I can
tell you that boys need a heck of a lot of imposed disciple so that they
can learn self-discipline; something that I am sure comes as no surprise
to an anthropologist but seems to be a major shock to most of those in the
"social sciences" and "human sciences". I have noticed
that a lot of bright kids are drugged as ADD, and they become a great deal
tamer, but they also lose a lot of what we prize bright kids for.

When they integrated my wife's school (a county detention school
formerly all girls) she
got a lot of boys who would be diagnosed as ADD today, but the County
didn't at that time believe in drugging its wards and tried not to do it.
She managed to teach them without drugs.

I do not know of a good unbiased study of ADD. I know of thousands whose
conclusions were known before the study was done, or which use such sloppy
methodology that no conclusion could be drawn. It's a hard experiment to
design; but is it reasonable to assume that in 30 years we have gone from an
unrecognized problem to one requiring us to drug over 20% of the boys in
school? It does not seem reasonable to me.

I do know that it is a
lot easier to drug kids than it is to teach them self-discipline. I also
suspect that the threat (with actuality if needed but the threat is
usually sufficient) of corporal punishment seems to help a lot in teaching
self-discipline: the kids need something to be afraid of. When I was young
we were seldom beaten whipped or otherwise struck, but we were somewhat
afraid of it, and more, we could use that fear with our peers: "I'd
love to do that with you but my folks would beat me to a pulp." Of
course they wouldn't beat me to a pulp, but by putting forth something we
all legitimately feared, we had a good reason not to put bags of burning
dog-turds on the neighbor's front porch and do other things that we
thought would be a very good thing to do except that the consequences
would be severe. And "being grounded" wasn't a big threat at
least not in WW II when it wasn't possible to "ground" farm
kids, and in high school when few of us had cars or access to cars in the
first place.

I suspect but can't prove that the explosion in cases of ADD correlates
with the total abandonment of corporal punishment for boys (and yes I know
that this sort of thing can be over-done. I have read Tom Brown's School
Days and other such stories; I can only say that in my time we were
terrified of the Sisters in early grades, the teachers in middle school,
and the Brothers in high school, but I know of no one actually harmed by
these "child abusers"...)

And I don't need abusive letters from psychiatrists who seem to think I
want nothing more than a chance to flog children. My point was that teaching
self-discipline requires a credible and effective deterrent to the behavior
you are trying to get them to extinguish. Mere withdrawal of privileges and
rewards is sometimes effective but not often. Kids know what you will and
will not do. Also, punishments that require a great deal of wasted time are
time wasters, while assigning academic work as punishment is very likely to
teach an obvious lesson we don't want taught. A whack with a wide belt or
ping pong paddle is mildly painful but no more so than boys get daily in
their normal course of life; it is over with swiftly; and it is credible.

Let me emphasize again: teaching self-discipline is work for both the
teacher and the pupil. It is one of the hardest lessons for bright, active,
young boys to learn. It is also one of the most important. Drugging them
does not teach them much other than lessons about drugs; it certainly does
not teach mastery of urges.

I have no magic solution to this, but my wife tells me that in LA County
at least the drug companies are getting rich, more than a quarter of the
kids are drugged, and the situation is getting worse, not better.

And from a reader:

I just finished reading your pages on Dyslexia and
ADD. Thought I'd add a bit more fuel to the fire...

My mother is a degreed reading specialist and former
teacher. Note the FORMER. She got out of teaching years ago when she
realized that the educational bureaucracy was mainly in it because they
could not teach. Her last teaching job, she was fired for being too
effective. How so? Because she used non-traditional methods to get kids to
read. Main thing she found was actually getting them interested, so she
stole my comic books when I was a kid. I may forgive her someday. Anyway,
she found very few true dyslexics, and only occasionally what you called
pseudo dyslexia's. Those usually took a couple of hours to find, and about 1
hour to teach kids alternatives. An interesting case in point is my wife.
She had a tendency to reverse numbers. Still does. My mother found it in
about 30 minutes of diagnostic testing, told her to read large print and
gave her a fresnel lens style magnifying glass. Problem solved. Note, my
wife had successfully graduated from college with this pseudo dyslexia.

The other point was the ADD. My eldest son has severe
ADHD. Now, before you shut off the rest of my discussion, he has a number of
other neurological problems that go with "true ADD". We resisted
this diagnosis for over a year precisely because I do believe that most kids
are drugged into compliance. Were it not for the other neurological symptoms
(such as a palsy in his hands, a tic with his tongue, and hypertension of
certain muscles) doubtless we would continue to resist. All that is to say
that there is an ADD & education industry devoted to making money off
these kids. Parents should be VERY leary of drugging their kids without a
competent evaluation from a pediatric neurologist specializing in ADD &
related disorders.